Tag: field recording

Under the sweltering late-summer sun, a small crew of filmmakers and audio historians capture Dawn Landes as she sings “The Brown Girl”. Cicadas drone, buses huff to a stop, bees hover lazily, sunflowers loom, and as the acetate spins, a song is carefully carved into its surface.

An age old and brutal choice: to marry for love or money? In the first side of Dawn Landes’ haunting 78, “The Brown Girl,” the noble Thomas chooses a plain brown girl with a dowry over his beautiful but land-less true love Ellender. Story songs like this one – which travelled from Scotland to the Appalachians over three hundred years – were the primetime dramas of the pre-television era. So the verses swiftly build into an epic, bloody tale with a twist. You can stream Side A of Dawn’s acetate here.

An age old and brutal choice: to marry for love or money? In the first side of Dawn Landes’ haunting 78, “The Brown Girl,” the noble Thomas chooses a plain brown girl with a dowry over his beautiful but land-less true love Ellender. Story songs like this one – which traveled from Scotland to the Appalachians over three hundred years – were the primetime dramas of the pre-television era. So the verses swiftly build into an epic, bloody tale with a twist. You’ll have to flip the record to find out how it ends…

It won’t be long now. By the time the week is out, you’ll be able to listen to a full track from one of our first recordings! Crackle, hiss, sirens, birds, cicadas, friends, voices, sadness, redemption, our PRESTOs have caught it all. And we made it digital so that you can hear it for yourself. Until then, here’s our full library of video teasers so far:

The shiny black surfaces of our blank acetates are mesmerizing. It’s easy to get stuck staring into one fresh out of the box. Fact is, though, as stunning and profound as the acetate is, it’s only skin deep. The core of these records is solid aluminum.

If you set the tension on the PRESTO’s cutting head incorrectly, you run the risk of your needle slicing straight through the acetate layer and hitting the aluminum core. Not only will the recording become unusable, but you will also waste your (expensive) needle.

Core Strength

During World War I & II, aluminum was essential for building airplanes, ships and weapons. This demand for raw elemental resources came at the height of PRESTO popularity, when the demand for recordings of American folk culture was also starting to take hold. So the PRESTO company offered an incentive program for broadcast companies and recording studios that were dealing with huge quantities of lacquer discs. The company would pay $.15 per used disc when they were returned in bulk. While it kept the company out of competition with the government over aluminum, this offer also led to the destruction of thousands of recordings from the 1940s.

Hearing your voice made ghostly by a machine from the past can do strange things to a man. When The Reverend John DeLore and Kara Suzanne updated the classic American murder ballad “Omie Wise” for The 78 Project, we warned them that the chip left over from the needle carving a groove into the acetate record was extremely flammable. Ok, maybe we also hinted it would make a mighty beautiful flare. That’s not to say we condone setting the streets on fire. Or take credit for it. John and Kara made the magic, we just remember it.